“SorrY.”
“Never mind. Just give me a good berth and tell my porter that he’d better address me as Mr. Long and give me as good a service as if I’d paid for this firstclass ticket out of my own pocket.”
“I will, but I sure hate to see the taxpayers pay for that ticket. You gonna pay ‘em back if you don’t recover the money?”
Longarm was getting irritated. “No,” he said shortly. “This conversation is over, Jess.”
“Sure,” the conductor said. “I got other firstclass passengers coming. And all of them have paid for their own firstclass tickets.”
“Well, good for them!”
“And one of ‘em is a duchess or a princess or some such thing.”
“You don’t say.”
Jess nodded vigorously. “She’s from England and of royal blue blood.”
“Have you seen her?”
“Yep,” Jess said.
Longarm had never met royalty before and he thought it would be interesting. “What’s she like?”
“She’s beautiful, just like you’d expect of an English princess.”
Longarm became even more interested. “About how old is the woman?”
“I’d judge her to be in her mid-twenties.”
“Traveling with a prince, I suppose?”
“Nope, traveling alone except for some old biddy who is bossy as hell. Mrs. Addie is her name, and I can already see that she’s going to give us all fits. She wants everything perfect for the princess. We had to do a lot of shuffling around to give them adjoining berths, the two largest and nicest on the train. The ones we use when the president of this line travels to and from Cheyenne.”
“How about that,” Longarm said, very impressed. “I hope I get a chance to meet this princess. Any idea why she is traveling to Cheyenne?”
“She’s bound for San Francisco.”
“Good,” Longarm said, “then I’ll have plenty of time to get acquainted with her.”
“I doubt that Mrs. Addie will even let you near the princess,” Jess said. “You might be wearing new clothes, but she’ll see that six-shooter strapped to your waist and she’ll know that you’re not a gentleman.”
“Well,” Longarm said, “perhaps I’ll leave my sidearm locked in my sleeping compartment.”
“You’d do that given all the enemies you’ve made as a United States marshal?”
“Will anyone else in the firstclass coach be wearing a six-gun?”
“No, but … well, you are a deputy United States marshal, and I’m sure there are plenty of folks who’d like to put a slug through your gizzard.”
“I didn’t say that I’d be completely disarmed.”
The conductor looked relieved. “Glad to hear that,” he said. “I was worried for a minute.”
Longarm patted the kindly old gent on the shoulder. “You just worry about Mrs. Addie. I’ll take care of myself, and it will help a lot if you warn the other staff about the fact that I’m traveling incognito.”
“Means in disguise, right?”
“Right.” Longarm grinned. “Jess, which compartment have they reserved for me?”
Jess consulted a clipboard with a roster of compartment assignments. “Uh-oh,” he said.
“What’s wrong?”
“You got the small one.”
“The small one?”
“Yes, it used to be used by the porter who took care of our firstclass passengers. But the railroad wanted to squeeze a few more pennies of profit so they converted it to a private firstclass compartment.”
“Humph,” Longarm snorted, not liking the sound of this.
“I wouldn’t be too upset,” Jess said. “After all, you’ll only have to put up with it for today. Since you’ve only got it up to Cheyenne, you’ll probably want to just stay in the parlor car.”
Longarm was not pleased. “Well, for crying out loud,” he complained. “I would have thought that, for the price of a firstclass ticket, I wouldn’t have to put up with that sort of inconvenience.”
“Well,” Jess said, “that compartment has a sizeable discount. In fact, it doesn’t cost the government a cent more than a second-class compartment.”
Longarm realized that Billy Vail had snookered him one more time. “Show me the way.”
Jess hailed a porter who was not all that much younger than himself. “Hello, Arnold.”
“Hi, Longarm.” Arnold eyed him up and down, and then he clucked his tongue and said, “Boy, you sure are gussied up!”
